Summer 2021
ENG505.01 (CRN 278) Shakespeare
W 5:00-7:50
Daniel Kempton
kemptond@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
The course will study the representation of “Otherness” (e.g., the woman, Moor, Jew, Oriental, American) in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Our study will set the plays in their historical context and make use of contemporary critical theory. As we read the plays themselves, we will also consider important cinematic productions and adaptations.
This is an online course with both synchronous and asynchronous components, meeting for seven weeks, 6/16-8/3.
Text:
Norton Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt, general editor, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2015.
ISBN 978-0393934991
ENG 551-01: Academic Writing Seminar
Online; Summer 2021
Matthew Newcomb: newcombm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
This course is to help students adjust to writing at the graduate level and to improve their understanding of academic writing processes and genres. Students will briefly explore the academic article, the conference paper, the abstract, the proposal, and the book review. Students will create short new documents and revise a previously written document. Special attention will be paid to introductions, conclusions, and situating arguments. Students will practice thinking strategically and rhetorically about academic writing from the level of the word up to a complete document. Student material written for previous courses will be used and revised.
Tentative Required Texts:
Hayot, Eric. The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities. Columbia UP, 2014.
MLA Handbook, 8th edition. Modern Language Association of America, 2016.
Williams, Joseph and Joseph Bizup. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 12th edition. Pearson,
2016. (Optional)
-Articles via handout or electronic reserve
ENG593: Children’s Literature, Prof. Fiona Paton
**Course may count either as an elective or for the post-1800 literature requirement**
Course Description:
Since the field of children’s literature is so historically and geographically diverse, a specific scope is required for a course of only 8 weeks duration. Hence, this course will focus on Anglo-American children’s fiction. Each week, for weeks 2-7, you will read two novels from different time periods, along with a short critical article on children’s literature and/or pedagogy. The novels have been paired according to their genre, in order to foreground certain aspects of style and content. My selections have been guided by the value of the texts as literature, as well their potential for teaching in the classroom. Some contain controversial content, either because of “dated” attitudes or because they engage with difficult content. Not all of these novels are ones that you would choose to teach, but they will raise questions that will help you to clarify why or why not. They will also prompt you to consider the historical development of children’s fiction, and the relationship between stories and cultural values. In this rich array of literature, you will find works familiar and unfamiliar, famous and obscure. Although paired in specific categories, the novels speak to each other across time and place, allowing to us develop a larger conversation about the construction of gender, race, and class in the imaginative worlds created for children.
Fall 2021
- 01: Shakespeare in Crisis
- Cyrus Mulready (mulreadc@newpaltz.edu)
W 5:00-7:50 p.m. (In-person)
Course Description:
Political upheaval, environmental catastrophe, racial unrest, and plague. These are not only the topics of our headlines, “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” to quote Polonius, but the very stuff of Shakespearean drama. Even after more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s works continue to inspire artists, scholars, and students to reflect on their resonance with our world today. In this course, we will explore how we interpret his plays and poems today in light of up to the minute concerns such as climate change, pandemic, autocracy, social justice, racial inequality, and gender bias. Do such interpretive engagements inaptly apply our modern concerns on this literature of the past? In our efforts to make Shakespeare “relevant,” do we lose sight of the work’s original vitality? Or can we find something revelatory, even redeeming, about reading and performing these plays that still seem to hold the mirror up to our world? Work for this course will include a series of short essays as well as brief presentations and engagement in class discussion.
Text: The Norton Shakespeare, Third Edition (or any well-prepared edition of the works, like the Riverside Shakespeare)
ENG 515-01: Modern Theories of Writing
Tuesday: 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Matthew Newcomb: newcombm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
This course will both prepare you to teach writing in a theoretically-informed way and involve you in contemporary research and conversations about writing, composition, and rhetoric. While the course will cover some key historical figures for composition studies (Aristotle, Plato, Quintilian), the majority of the time will be spent on key debates and issues in the field of composition studies as it has existed since the first Conference on College Composition and Communication in the middle of the twentieth century. Those topics will likely include (but are not limited to) the rhetorical situation, theories of argument, the role of composition courses, assessment concerns, new technologies and writing, the role of the author, approaches to grammar and style, public and cultural aspects of writing, and writing across the curriculum. Many readings will be key journal articles and academic books from the last several decades. Students will also gain a larger historical understanding of the movements within composition studies and will be encouraged to develop and try alternative theories and strategies in their writing and in their teaching of writing. Students will enact their own research into the field of composition and will prepare materials for teaching writing as well (such as lesson plans, syllabi, textbook reviews, and/or assignment sheets). We will also spend time talking about our current composition courses and sharing ideas for immediate teaching.
Tentative Required Texts:
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Studies in American Colleges 1900-1985.
Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Miller, Susan. Ed. The Norton Book of Composition Studies. W.W. Norton, 2009.
ENG 522-01 Modernity and Modernism in Britain
T 5:00-7:50
Stella Deen: deenm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
From about 1880 to 1940, modern art in Britain was shaped by challenges to the intertwined powers of patriarchy and Empire, both centered in London. In this course we will take modern London as the vortex of these challenges and locus of new art forms. Specific focal points for our inquiry will include
- How did new technologies and new currents of thought, including philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, and primitivism, shape modern literature?
- How did colonial intellectuals in the metropolis challenge Englishness as the locus of knowledge and creativity?
- What impact did women’s increased access to public spaces have on the literary representation of London?
Featured authors may include Mulk Raj Anand, E.M. Forster, C.L.R. James, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Wilfred Owen, Walter Pater, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf. Students will engage in weekly seminar debate, make oral presentations, and write original and insightful literary criticism informed by research.
- 01 Poetry Workshop
- Kristopher Jansma: jansmak@newpaltz.edu
Dennis Doherty
Course Description
In this writing workshop, participants will consider traditions and trends animating contemporary poetry and develop strategies for constructing their own. The primary goal of the course is for each poet to find a distinctive identity in terms of imagery, language, and subject matter. Additionally, class members will assist in creating poetry-writing exercises. They also will share independent work as well as participate in peer reviews, in which the group works collectively to appreciate and analyze poems by writers in our class, offering constructive feedback. Assignments include a midterm and a final portfolio of poems.
Required Texts:
Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise. Norton
Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning. University of Pittsburg Press
Tracy Smith, Life on Mars. Graywolf
Recommended:
Greene, Roland, et al editors. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 4th Edition.
ENG 552-01: Workshop in Fiction and Memoir: Mastering the Short Form
R 5:00-7:50 (In Person)
Course Description:
In this course we will focus obsessively on both forms of short narratives: the short story and the personal essay. Each week we will carefully consider a piece of work of a master storywriter or essayist in close detail, and then develop our own work modeled on their approach. In an ongoing workshop discussion, each week students bring in their own original work to discuss and revise with the larger group. Every student in this class will, over the course of one semester, create drafts of multiple short works of fiction and nonfiction which can be published or pitched individually, or become the cornerstones of a collected body of work.
Required Texts:
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
John McFee – Draft No. 4
ENG 579-01 – Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: “Identity, Alterity, and Ambiguity in 19th-Century American Fiction”
M 5:00-7:50 p.m. (3 Credits, In-person)
- Christopher A. Link linkc@newpaltz.edu
- Crystal Donkor
“He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.”
—Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”
Course Description:
This course is a graduate-level, seminar-style course devoted to the critical study of selected works of nineteenth-century American fiction (short stories, long stories, and novels). The overarching theme of the course for the Fall 2021 semester is “Identity, Alterity, and Ambiguity”—though the course will also serve as an advanced introduction to major canonical (and some lesser-known) authors and texts of the period. Close consideration will be given to various literary constructions of “the self” and “the other” from this period, including, but not restricted to, representations of racial, sexual, and class differences/identities. Special attention will be devoted to texts in which the very notions of “identity” and “otherness” (i.e., alterity) are problematized, challenged, or made ambiguous—particularly, though not exclusively, through practices of masquerade, including the adoption of various social masks or personae. Rather than a simple survey of the best-known texts in nineteenth-century American fiction (e.g., The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc.), this thematically focused course will instead consider important key texts of the period—major works of lasting influence—strongly reflecting the era’s national preoccupation with self-identity and questions of one’s responsibility toward the other. As a result, the course will also frequently address (in secondary critical texts and lecture material) significant historical, cultural, and ideological contexts of the period: e.g., slavery and Abolitionism, the “color line,” reform culture (including the Temperance movement), the Women’s Rights movement, Transcendentalism, etc.
Course Texts for Purchase (Anticipated):
Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee (1836) (NYRB, ISBN: 1590172299)
Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842) (Duke UP, ISBN: 0822339420)
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855) (Bedford St. Martins, ISBN: 031245242X) {Recommended only—pdf online}
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Ed., ISBN: 039397927X)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) (Norton Critical Edition, ISBN: 0393976378)
Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask (1866) (Harper Perennial, ISBN: 0688151329)
George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes (1880) (Penguin, ISBN: 9780140433227)
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) (Norton Critical Ed., 2nd Ed., ISBN: 0393925358)
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) (University of Michigan Press, ISBN 9780472061341)
Additional Course Texts on Blackboard:
Short tales and brief selections by Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plus additional materials and secondary critical essays.
ENG 585-01: Studies in Contemporary Criticism and Theory—Anthropocene Nonhumanities
R 5:00-7:50 PM
Online Synchronous
Professor Jed Mayer: mayere@newpaltz.edu
Course Description: The mark of humans may now be read in all earthly things, from the strata of the lithosphere to the upper reaches of the stratosphere. The Anthropocene, as many have proposed we call this too-human geological and climatological era, calls for a radical reconsideration of the nonhuman world and humanity’s place within it. Human-induced climate change and the sixth extinction have irreparably harmed nonhuman populations and ecosystems, yet humans must also reckon with the destructive climatic forces for which we are in large part responsible. The nonhuman is at once more vulnerable and more destructive than at any time within human history. And yet as we struggle to articulate the nonhuman, to speak responsibly for endangered species and ecologies, they continue to elude representation. Vaster than mega-hurricanes, smaller than microplastics, Anthropocene nonhumanities call for fresh approaches and new epistemologies. In this seminar we will study some of the more influential philosophical perspectives on the nonhuman, as well as the more generative recent developments in critical theory, and consider the ways in which modes of literary representation have attended to the nonhuman, and how they might offer us cognitive direction for our shared future.
Required Texts:
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed.
Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
ENG 588: Studies in Comparative Literature: The Epic Tradition
R 5:00-7:40 p.m.
Professor Thomas Festa: festat@newpaltz.edu
*N.B.: This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement
Course description:
Much like the books it is designed to survey, this course will attempt the impossible: close study of the epic genre from antiquity through the modern age. This most ancient and capacious of genres always seems to threaten dissolution into a variety of component parts and set pieces, tropes and topics and formulae—in other words, smaller, more manageable bits. Yet the grandeur and sweep of the epic derives from its uncompromising nature, its encyclopedic scope, its centripetal / centrifugal synthesis, and its profound and often haunting violence. The traditional epic has, by almost all accounts, been supplanted by more accommodating forms such as the novel and film. As attentive study of the genre reveals, however, epic itself haunts other narrative forms, in some ways as their emulated origin, and in others as their repressed alternative.
Texts ordered for the course (each has been reprinted several times; please be sure to use these translations):
Homer, Iliad, trans. Peter Green (U of California P; ISBN 9780520281431)
Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (FSG; ISBN: 9780374525743)
Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Hackett; ISBN: 9780872207318)
Dante, The Portable Dante, ed. Mark Musa (Penguin; ISBN: 9780142437544)
Walcott, Omeros (FSG; ISBN: 9780374523503)
Additional secondary readings will be available via Blackboard.
ENG 593-01 The Graphic Novel (seated, 3 credits)
W 5-7.50pm
Professor Michelle Woods: woodsm@newpaltz.edu
**Course may count either as an elective or for the post-1800 literature requirement**
Course Description:
“With its juxtaposed frames,” Hillary Chute writes, “comics constantly calls readers’ attention to what they see, or don’t see, and why. What can be seen within the frame – and what can’t be seen, or isn’t supposed to be seen … We can say that its very grammar, then, evokes the unsaid, or inexpressible.” How have comics – graphic novels – become a form that deals both with private and public upheaval, unsayability, unseeablity? This course, with readings on comics theory (Scott McCloud and Hillary Chute), picture theory (WJT Mitchell), looks specifically at three areas of the contemporary graphic novel: memoir, memoir and political upheaval, and formally innovative works, to question how we see identity, history, political and philosophical change, and finally how we see artistic innovation: how we might challenge how we read even when we’re reading without words. We’ll be looking at queer identity, neuronormativity, climate change, the civil rights movement and race, immigration and exile, the Holocaust, totalitarianism and the fallout of history. We’ll be looking at what we can see, what we can read, and what we can’t.
Possible Texts:
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do
Ken Krimstein, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
Nora Krug, Belonging
John Lewis, The March: Vol II
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Richard McGuire, Here
Summer Pierre, All the Sad Songs
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Art Spiegelman, Maus
ENG 593.03: African American Print Culture
T: 5:00-7:50pm
**Course may count either as an elective or for the post-1800 literature requirement**
Course Description:
This course will explore the longstanding tradition of the Black Press in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From its early overt political demands of abolition, African American citizenship, and voting rights; to its establishment of the African American literary tradition and various forms of cultural expression and influence, this course encourages inquiry beyond simple questions of authorship and proposes more complex interrogations of readership, circulation, collaboration, dissemination, innovation, and representation. Undoubtedly, the Black press has had profound impacts on African American life and American print culture, more broadly. Students in this course will trace these impacts through the use of a wide range of digital archives of African American newspapers and print culture materials alongside recent scholarship. Students will also engage recent scholarship such as Kim Gallon’s Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press and the edited volume, Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print.
